Costa Rica Sends Its First 123 Prisoners Into the Bukele Model
Costa Rica transferred the first 123 inmates into its new mega-prison on Tuesday, turning a borrowed Salvadoran blueprint into a functioning system of mass confinement. The government released images of men in orange uniforms, heads shaved, sitting with their hands behind their necks. The choreography was unmistakable: Costa Rica wants the spectacle of Nayib Bukele’s prison state as much as its architecture.
The High-Containment Center against Organized Crime, known as CACCO, stands in Alajuela outside San José. President Laura Fernández inaugurated the $35 million complex on October 14. It can hold 5,100 people—roughly one-fifth of Costa Rica’s current prison population—and was designed with assistance from El Salvador.
Justice Minister Gabriel Aguilar called the prison a ‘monument to national security’ as the first buses arrived. His ministry says CACCO will isolate organized-crime leaders, stop them directing operations from existing prisons and reduce overcrowding elsewhere.
Costa Rica does face a real security crisis. Homicides reached a record 905 in 2023, then remained extraordinarily high at 876 in 2024 and 873 in 2025. Authorities blame most killings on criminal groups fighting over trafficking routes and local drug markets. The expansion of the Caribbean port at Limón helped turn the country into a major cocaine transit point toward Europe, while foreign cartels and local networks embedded themselves in transport, finance and public institutions.
But a real crisis does not make every response effective—or lawful.
Fernández’s government has copied a prison model built for El Salvador’s emergency regime, where more than 91,000 people have been detained since 2022. Human-rights groups have documented arbitrary arrests, prolonged detention without individualized evidence, abuse and deaths in custody. Bukele’s government credits the crackdown with reducing homicide, while making shaved heads, bowed bodies and mass cells central to its political propaganda.
Costa Rica’s first transfer reproduced that visual language. Reuters reported that the Justice Ministry distributed images resembling those from El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. The display reduces prisoners to an anonymous mass before the public knows the legal status or evidence against each person.
That distinction matters because at least some of the first men selected for CACCO were described in advance as suspects, not convicted defendants. Local reporting said Fernández personally requested that three men linked to the May killing of police officer Gerson Rosales be among the first transfers. Their detention does not establish guilt.
A prison built before the rules were settled
Costa Rica’s human-rights ombudsman urged authorities to postpone transfers until technical and legal criteria were clear. The institution warned that CACCO created a risk of arbitrary classification and political interference. Former justice minister Marco Feoli, now connected to the United Nations torture-prevention system, argued that the government was importing a solution designed for Salvadoran gangs into a country facing a different structure of transnational drug trafficking.
The prison also arrives inside an already punitive system. El País reported that Costa Rica ranks among the world’s highest-incarceration countries, with overcrowding above 50 percent after the prison population doubled in a decade. CACCO can absorb thousands of people, but capacity alone does not answer why existing prisons became recruitment centers, why money laundering penetrates legal businesses or why trafficking networks can corrupt state institutions.
Mass confinement can temporarily separate powerful prisoners from their organizations. It cannot police ports, trace illicit finance, protect witnesses, expand youth employment or rebuild communities where the drug economy recruits. Those tasks require investigators, prosecutors, social investment and accountable institutions—not only concrete and razor wire.
Fernández has presented CACCO as proof that the state is taking control. The deeper test is whether Costa Rica preserves the rule of law while confronting violence. If individual evidence, legal counsel, medical care and independent monitoring become obstacles to be discarded, the prison will not defend Costa Rican democracy. It will teach the country to fear the state as much as the criminal networks it promises to defeat.
The first 123 inmates are now inside. What follows will determine whether CACCO is a secure prison governed by law or the beginning of a copied emergency regime.
Sources and image credits
Hero/card archive photo: Tia Dufour / U.S. Department of Homeland Security via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, March 26, 2025; cropped and overlaid. It depicts CECOT in El Salvador, not CACCO in Costa Rica.
Inline archive photo: Tia Dufour / U.S. Department of Homeland Security via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, March 26, 2025. It depicts CECOT in El Salvador, not the October 2026 transfer.
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